Advocates of increasing the size of Boulder County’s Board of County Commissioners fell short of collecting enough petition signatures to gain a spot on the November 2020 general election ballot.

However, proponents of the idea of asking county voters to increase the number of commissioners from three to five can mount another petition drive next year and intend to do so, Lafayette resident Gary Cooper, a leader of the effort, said Monday.

“We’ll have another shot at it right after the first of the year,” Cooper said.

Backers of the five-commissioner ballot proposal, who began circulating petitions in May, had until Nov. 18 to collect and turn in at least 13,926 registered Boulder County voters’ signature to qualify for the 2020 ballot.

On Nov. 15, Cooper wrote Boulder County elections coordinator Justine Vigil-Tapia that “I have not collected enough signatures so will not be submitting the (petition) package.”

Gary Cooper

Cooper declined Monday to say how many signatures were collected.

“We’ll do a better job next time,” said Cooper, who was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for the District 3 county board seat in 2018. “We will be better organized.”

He said the next petition drive is expected to begin in March.

Once again, proponents will have to collect 13,926 voters’ signatures to have the five-commissioner proposal placed on the November 2020 ballot — a number Cooper said is set by law as equivalent to 8% of the total Boulder County votes cast in the 2018 election for Colorado Secretary of State.

Each of Boulder County’s three commissioners now has to live within a specific geographic area of the county but is chosen in a countywide election.

Boulder County’s three current Board of County Commissioners districts are:

• District 1, a southwest area that includes part of the city of Boulder west of Foothills Parkway, along with the mountain communities of Nederland, Ward and Jamestown. Boulder Democrat Elise Jones now represents District 1, but she’s term-limited and the seat will be up for election in 2020.

• District 2,which stretches from Allenspark in the west to Longmont in the east and includes Lyons and Hygiene. Longmont Democrat Deb Gardner now represents District 2. She also is term-limited, and the seat will be up for election in 2020.

• District 3, primarily a southeast county district whose western boundary is Foothills Parkway and includes Louisville, Lafayette, Superior and the Boulder County portion of Erie as well as Niwot and Gunbarrel. Louisville Democrat Matt Jones was elected in 2018 to a four-year term to represent District 3.

If voters approve moving to a five-member county board, a second ballot question being proposed by Cooper and other advocates of the change — including the League of Women Voters of Boulder County — would ask voters to choose between two methods of electing representatives to the board.

One would be for each of the five commissioners to be a resident of a specific geographic district and be elected only by voters living in that district.

The second option would be for three board members to represent specific geographic districts and be elected only by voters within the district. The other two commissioners would represent the entire county and be elected by all county voters.

This is the second time advocates of a five-member Boulder County governing panel have failed to collect enough signatures to advance their proposal to the ballot.

In July 2018, when 10,835 signatures were needed to place the question on the ballot, Cooper reported he and others gathered about 1,100 signatures.

At the timehe said the signatures collected in that initial effort demonstrated “there really is an appetite” for expanding the board to five members.

Boulder County commissioners could place a five-member board question on the ballot themselves, but backers of the idea failed in 2018 and again this year to convince commissioners to do so.